From Hollywood stars to Vietnam vets, the Pan Am girls never knew who — or what — to expect on their flights, they tell Carol Midgley

In Pan Am, the much-hyped new American drama series, a quartet of young stewardesses clad in peacock-blue uniforms and white gloves sashay in perfect formation through a 1960s airport. Waists waspishly thin, backs ramrod straight, pillbox hats set atop L’Oréal-glossy hair, they carry their handbags on the crook of their arms as the voiceover hails them the “new breed of woman”: educated, graceful, independent, poised — the envied girls who traversed the globe, earning more than the average man while never looking less than immaculate.

The four British women sitting opposite me today know well the rigour with which Pan American